Every year, for the past four, I travel down to Cali, Colombia to talk about “service innovation.” I spend a week with a group of young managers from places like Colgate-Palmolive and Cadbury Schweppes, exploring the anatomy of great service experiences. How do The Four Seasons, Starbucks and Apple Stores engineer unparalleled experience? What frustrates […]
Tag: Center for Leadership
Principals benefit from new paradigm in leadership training.
Blending established leadership training with best business practices was the core of an innovative Principals Leadership Development Program launched in June at Florida International University (FIU). The inaugural class of thirty public school principals attended the intense weeklong program, a collaboration of FIU’s Center for Leadership and Miami-Dade County Public Schools, with the generous support […]
A lesson on leadership—from Venezuela with love
During my recent seminar on “influencing” for 240 managers and entrepreneurs in South America, one issue participants shared with me was the “leadership vacuum.” Local executives, who reach seniority, want to leave Venezuela because of the difficulty of doing business there, and outsiders resist being posted in the country for the same reason. As a […]
Oil spill may force an innovative social construction.
As oil continues to fill the waters off my wife’s home state, Louisiana, inventors around the world are surely scheming up new technologies to prevent such catastrophes from happening again. While I wish for their success and am thankful for their efforts, history says their energy would be better spent engineering a different kind of […]
Revenues down but spirits up for women business leaders, reports FIU survey.
The recession has had a major impact on Florida businesses and non-profit organizations. But, overwhelmingly, women executives throughout the state demonstrate confidence, hope, resilience and optimism. Those findings are from the 2010 Florida’s Woman-led Businesses study, the fifth of its kind conducted by the Center for Leadership at Florida International University (FIU). More than 300 […]
The duck flaps ahead of the competition.
Earlier in the week I started reviewing the insurance giant Aflac. In 2004 we start to see the growth rates of Aflac suddenly starting to climb and a new radical idea was starting to pay off for Aflac: the duck. Over 2003 and 2004, Aflac started to enjoy the fruits of an uncommon bet it […]
What’s a Duck to Do?
Pre-1992, even loyal customers struggled to recall the insurance company’s name—the “American Family Life Assurance Company.” But today, customer and non-customers alike, indeed anyone in the United States. or Japan who watches television, cannot take a summer stroll past a park pond without thinking “Aflac.” How did a small, family-owned, run-of-the-mill insurance company from Georgia […]
Where, Oh Where, Is My Tata Nano?
Learn to Use Reverse Innovation I kept my eyes on the blurring, chaotic stream of Mumbai traffic, looking for the famed “Tata Nano”—the cheapest car in the world. To be honest, I don’t think I saw one, but then again, I’m not sure I would recognize it crammed between moto-rickshaws and the tiny black Soviet-era-looking […]
Computers and the Crash: Human Intuition Cannot Be Replaced
Last week’s one-day stock market plunge nearly ruined our kitchen. We are remodeling our house and planned to sell stock to cover the cost of kitchen cabinets, but when we called our broker to initiate the trade we learned our shares had dropped 20% in just a few hours! We knew something strange was happening—the […]
Find an Expansive View
Picking the right scale for your mission is an art. Define your purpose too narrowly and soon run out of aspirations to fill. Set your sights too high and you risk de-motivating your people. To illustrate this concept, I want to examine two seemingly similar companies: inVentiv Health (VTIV) and PDI Inc. (PDII). In 2002 […]